


Woke Up Afraid of My Own Shadow

by KatenissEverdeen



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Lonliness, Newt!Whump, Nightmares, Nobody uses "whump" anymore, Weird imagery, angsty, self-soothing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-03-14
Packaged: 2019-03-31 11:36:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13974291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatenissEverdeen/pseuds/KatenissEverdeen
Summary: (Like, genuinely afraid)Newt has nightmares and nobody to talk to.Pretending someone else is there is the best he can get.





	Woke Up Afraid of My Own Shadow

Newt hadn’t been sleeping well lately. Not that he had ever slept very well--he either slept too much or not at all, his own self-induced, self-perpetuating cycle. He’d stay up and drink too much coffee because look at all the things he had to do, how could he sleep, and then pass out for hours and hours at a time due to his earlier lack of rest. Lately, however, he had been kept awake out of fear. He felt like a damn kid, staying awake because he was scared of his own nightmares. He wasn’t superstitious. He was a scientist, and he knew logically that they couldn’t hurt him; that it was all stuff from his subconscious. Yeah, it was all from his subconscious. Maybe if he said that enough times, he’d start to believe it himself. 

He sat on his bed for a while, tossing and turning, trying to find a position he could relax in. But it was clearly impossible that evening. He gave up and messed around on his phone, playing stupid games and deleting old pictures and watching the same three videos over and over again. Eventually he started to feel himself drop off, and the fear almost shocked him awake, but not quite enough to wake him up. All he felt was a sudden surge of panic as it felt like the life was being pressed out of his body with each breath. He felt his consciousness fading quickly, and before he knew it, he was 

_Watching the blind prophets with their stones in hand large and horrifying and somehow **wrong** and they threw them into the heat and the darkness and he heard a cracking and oh god they weren’t rocks they were **eggs** and he heard two weak roars that slowly melded and shifted into one hoarse cry that shouldn’t be it shouldn’t be happening this was never meant to happen _

Newt stirred in his sleep, eyes darting underneath his eyelids, the surrounding skin dark with weariness.

_And now something new and unreal and unholy coming up out of the earth a Thing that knew nothing but destruction and It roared, not loudly but raspingly, so you had to perversely strain your ears to hear It, and when It screamed the world was violently pushed out of place, the whole universe shifted in a way it was never meant to, and_

Newt inhaled sharply.

_There was a group of people, ordinary humans but the brightest minds who had all gathered to contain this threat and they couldn’t, they could never have hoped to contain This, and they kept talking even as their faces melted and moved off center, as eyes sunk into hungry, waiting skin or were left hanging on long ropes of flesh or simply fell out, as the world crumbled and fell apart, as the epicenter of it all, where that Thing cried Its hoarse cry that mutilated the world, froze and stuck in time, where It could wait--for It was fragile, for all Its destructive power, and It had to bide Its time_

Newt turned over in his sleep, and his phone fell out of his hand. He had been gripping it so hard it left indents in his skin. 

_And for years the world had changed and broken and frozen, creatures that were once human made out of melted and twisted bodies roamed the landscape, finding their loved ones from their former lives and tearing and fighting and killing them, and anyone could become one, all you had to do was hear the echo of that hoarse shriek, and after a while you almost wished to hear it, just to end the waiting, because you would hear it eventually, we’d all hear it eventually_

His breath quickened.

_And just when he thought he could live like this, when we all thought we could live like this, the Thing that had been frozen started to move, slowly at first, but then faster and faster and we knew it wasn’t a figment of our imaginations it was real it was our worst fears coming to pass and when It spoke again It would destroy us all and It didn’t care because It didn’t see us couldn’t understand us It was just living and that was enough to kill us we were doomed the day they lifted those rocks those eggs and oh god oh god they were standing in a vast empty desert that was **full of eggs**_

Newt woke up, almost screaming, and tried to catch his breath. He took a few minutes to remind himself where he was and who he was and when it was--he patted down the sheets for his phone, found it. It was about 3:30 AM. He had only been asleep for an hour or so, and it was a long way until morning.

He rolled over onto his side and put his hand gently on his head and started to play with his own hair, pretending it was someone else. Was it sad? Yes. Did it help? Yes. He leaned into the slight pressure, associating his hand with people he had known and would never ask for this simple comfort. 

He had been doing this more and more often lately, when it felt like he would crack open and break from sheer loneliness. Some small, traitorous part of himself told him that it would be better to feel the connection again, to give up and let the Hivemind overwhelm him, just to feel like he wasn’t alone. But even he knew that was a stupid plan. So he played with his hair, he rubbed his shoulders, he hugged himself, he squeezed under desks and surrounded himself with blankets and pretended he could hear a voice telling him that he was worried over nothing, and that things would be fine. He felt pathetic, pretending someone else was telling him that things would be alright when he knew damn well that they wouldn't be, not when he felt that slight electric tic at the back of his brain. He knew what it meant. He also knew he couldn't say anything. 

He blinked to clear the sting out of his eyes and waited for the daylight that seemed like it would never come.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Coranam for beta-ing this and Josh Darnielle for the title.
> 
> Update as of "Uprising": Son of a bitch.


End file.
